Construction grammar and conventional discourse: A construction-based approach to discoursal incongruity

In line with recent work extending the constructional approach to dialogic constructions (e.g. Fried, 2009; Linell, 2009), we argue that constructional analysis can be profitably extended to larger-than-the-sentence chunks representing conventionalized discourses, such as classroom discourse, telephone-call openings, scholarly editions, horoscopes, etc. The structural regularities associated with these genres – realized, in our examples, either as fixed sequencing or as formal templates – can be recast as the (semi)-schematic features of large scale constructions. To the extent that lexical choices are constrained (and can be rendered, for example, in the form of drop lists), they are accommodated as their (semi)-substantive component. Clause-level patterns, typical of the discourses we analyze, are also recognized as constructions on the basis of their conventional association with each genre. Using established in the constructional literature attribute–value pairs, we demonstrate that the constructional approach allows for a construction-by-construction and word-by word identification of the conventional make-up of these supra-clausal patterns; when such patterns are humorously exploited, a constructional analysis foregrounds the verbal basis of the incongruity in a principled way. This proposal allows us to embed entrenched patterns of all sizes uniformly in a theory of grammar, accounts for different types of (encoding) idiomaticity and provides common cognitive grounding for all kinds of conventional knowledge (cf. Östman, 2005).